Thursday, July 10, 2008

Another look at scIQ: In the last post on correlates of scIQ, readers wondered if people who are just as knowledgeable about science as anyone else but who holds fundamentalist religious beliefs were receiving an artificially low scIQ score. I eliminated the three questions that touched on the question of creation or the age of the earth (i.e., the Big Bang, continental drift, and human evolution) and re-calculated scores with the remaining eight questions. Here are the results:

It does raise the scores of blacks and Hispanics a little when the 3 questions are removed, but it really makes a difference in the area of religion. The Protestant mean goes up a few points when non-whites are omitted, and it goes up again when the 3 questions are removed. And, compared to the very religious, the folks who never go to church no longer have higher scIQs. In fact, the churchgoers' means are higher for whites and all races together.

I mentioned in the last post that there is practically no correlation between IQ and church attendance, and after removing the 3 questions from the scIQ quiz, there is now no correlation between it and going to church--it is .01.

So it's not that people who are informed about science at a basic level are staying away from church; they just reject what science says if it conflicts with their religious beliefs.

4 comments:

This analysis suggests to me that religious people have a highly-specific and encapsulated minimal dis-belief system in relation to science.

This is healthy, it seems to me, since religion offers many personal and societal benefits (happiness, altruism, fertility, conservatism - which is a good counterbalance even if you happen not to be a conservative) - and of course science is absolutely essential to the continuation of our civilization.

So it is a good thing that they can coexist harmoniously (for the most part).

Hence the US is the leading scientific nation in the world, and the most religious of developed nations too.

this is very interesting. i'd really like to see this on a white protestant/catholic basis. would you be able to strip out black (primarily protestant i assume) and hipanics (primaril catholics i assume) to get the white protestant/catholic scores for this and the full survey?

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"The creation myth was the essential bond that held the tribe together. It provided its believers with a unique identity, commanded their fidelity, strengthened order, vouchsafed law, encouraged valor and sacrifice, and offered meaning to the cycles of life and death. No tribe could survive long without the meaning of its existence defined by a creation story. The option was to weaken, dissolve, and die." ~ E.O. Wilson